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Anusvara (Sanskrit: अनुस्वारः anusvāra) is the diacritic used to mark a type of nasal sound used in a number of Indic scripts. Depending on the location of the anusvara in the word and the language in which it is used, its exact pronunciation can vary greatly.
In the context of Sanskrit, anusvara may also refer also to the nasal sound itself.
In Vedic Sanskrit, the anusvāra (lit. "after-sound") is a sound that occurs as an allophone of /m/, at a morpheme boundary, or /n/ morpheme-internally, if either of them is preceded by a vowel and followed by a fricative (/ś/, /ṣ/, /s/ or /h/). The material in the various ancient phonetic treatises points to two possible phonetic descriptions. The anusvara could amount to an effect on the preceding vowel, consisting in nasalisation (different from the anunāsika) accompanied by lengthening. Alternatively, the anusvara could have been realised as a nasal fricative having the same place of articulation as the following consonant. The discrepancies have been attributed to differences of analysis of the same pronunciation or to dialectal or diachronic variation.
In the later language its use gradually expanded to other contexts. The anusvāra first began to be used before /r/ under certain conditions. Later, in Classical Sanskrit, its use had extended before /l/ and /y/, replacing earlier [l̃] and [ỹ]. It began to be used to replace the homorganic nasal before a plosive: Pāṇini gave such an optional use in sandhi word-finally, and later treatises also prescribed it at morpheme junctions and in intra-morphemic position.
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